Afterword: Omissions,Additions, and Corrections The astute reader will notice that I’ve omitted a few online services. Some were so short-lived or of so little consequence that they would be meaningless to most readers. Others are beyond the theme or time frame of this book. Some of the omissions: ᭿ ABI/INFORM (Abstracted Business Information), a database of abstracted information from selected business publications, hosted by ORBIT, Dialog, and eventually UMI/ProQuest ᭿ Data Courier, a small online service hosted by the Louisville Courier- Journal (the owners of which bought ABI/INFORM under the company name “Data Courier”) ᭿ EasyLink, Western Union’s now-defunct email/FAX/mail system ᭿ Easynet, a front end for more than 700 database services ᭿ EasyPlex, a specialized CompuServe email service ᭿ E-COM, the United States Postal Service’s electronic messaging service (EMS) ᭿ Freenet, free BBSs in cities such as Cleveland and Rochester that used the same software and were designed to serve as community centers ᭿ Info-Look, a gateway to online services hosted by Nynex ᭿ Internet Relay Chat (IRC), the first implementation of real-time chatting via the Internet (Jarkko Oikarinen, 1988) ᭿ Knowledge Index (KI), a subset of Dialog databases ᭿ The Microsoft Network (MSN), more an ISP than online service that started after Bill Gates decided that the Internet was going to be important, after all 177 178 Afterword ᭿ MIX, the McGraw-Hill Information Exchange, a CoSy-based service for educators ᭿ NABU Network, a Canadian online service that operated a short-lived online service in the Washington, DC, area ᭿ Official Airline Guide (OAG), publisher of the Official Airline Guide ᭿ On Tyme, Tymnet’s email service ᭿ Portal, an early BBS-based service ᭿ Quali-Comm, General Electric Information Service’s commercial email service ᭿ The Sierra On-Line Network, a graphic online gaming service, initially called ImaginNation ᭿ Telidon, Canadian Videotex service ᭿ Telemail/SprintMail, email services hosted by Telenet (later SprintNet) ᭿ WIX (Windows Information eXchange), a short-lived service, hosted by Byte, for Windows users and developers ᭿ ZiffNet, a collection of services (downloads, magazine articles) originally hosted on several online services (including Prodigy) and now a web- based service Events after 1994 are generally not detailed because after that year the Web was well established, and we were no longer “on the way to the Web.” Thus the great AOL outage of 1998 isn’t chronicled here. Nor are online scams, stock manipulation, pornography, the CIA investigation of weapons dealing that involved CompuServe, ruined marriages, murders, and other crimes involving the Internet. Maybe in another book. In the meantime, I have extended this book with a website. The site offers additions and corrections that may come up after publication, clickable links to companies and institutions mentioned herein, more graphics, and other relevant resources. The URL is easy to remember—it’s the book’s title: http://www.onthewaytotheweb.com APPENDIX A Online Timeline 1945 Vannevar Bush publishes his famous essay, “As We May Think” in The Atlantic Monthly. This breakthrough paper provides a new way to control and access information, which even then threatened to overload humanity’s ability to manage it. Bush proposes a device called a memex, which will not only manage information, but will also create associative trails through knowledge, not unlike the system of hyperlinks that drive the World Wide Web. 1957 Soviet rocketeers successfully orbit the first artificial Earth satellite, Sputnik. This inspires the US government to form and fund the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) under the auspices of the Department of Defense. 1960 J.C.R. Licklider publishes the famous paper, “Man-Computer Symbiosis,” on the theme of using computers to augment thinking and facilitate human com- munication. Paul Baran at RAND develops the concept of distributed commu- nication and message blocks for telephone networks. 179 180 Appendix A Online Timeline 1961 The first paper on packet-switching theory is presented by Leonard Kleinrock (“Information Flow in Large Communication Nets”). 1962 J.C.R. Licklider is appointed ARPA’s fourth director, and director of ARPA’s Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO), and introduces his Inter- galactic Network, the first presentation of the concept behind the Internet. The first paper on the concept of the Internet is presented by J.C.R. Licklider and Welden Clark (“On-Line Man Computer Communication”). At RAND, Paul Baran develops the concept and design for a decentralized voice tele- phone network that would be capable of surviving a nationwide nuclear attack; Baran later worked as an informal consultant to the ARPANET group. 1963 Government and industry representatives develop the ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange). The ASCII code specifies 128 unique 7-bit data strings, each representing a letter of the English alphabet, an Arabic numeral, a punctuation mark, or special symbol. ASCII provides the lingua franca for communication between different kinds of computers. 1964 Kleinrock accepts a faculty position at UCLA; his book Communications Nets is published. Licklider returns to MIT and is replaced by Robert Herzfield. Ivan Sutherland becomes director of ARPA’s Information Processing Tech- niques Office (IPTO) and hires Bob Taylor, a mathematician and psychologist, as deputy director. The first paper on secure packetized voice communication is written by Paul Baran (“On Distributed Communications Networks”). The existence of this paper generated the erroneous rumor that the Internet was created to survive nuclear war. A meeting between Licklider and Roberts inspires Roberts to undertake the creation of the Internet. Writing in The Atlantic Monthly, Martin Greenberger of MIT posits the development of computer-based “information utilities.” Appendix A Online Timeline 181 1965 Under contract from ARPA, Larry Roberts of MIT and Thomas Marrill of SDC carry out the first long-distance computer communications experiment in February. A TX-2 computer at MIT’s Lincoln Lab is connected with a Q-32 system at SDC in Santa Barbara. It’s the first wide area network (WAN), and the first time computers communicate using data packets. General Electric opens the first online service—a time-sharing business serving commercial customers; clients use teletypewriters to communicate with GE’s computers via telephone hookups. In England, Donald Watts Davies at the National Physical Laboratory develops his concept of a distributed computer network and independently invents packet switching. (He also coins the term.) One of the first email systems is set up on time-sharing mainframe computers. It con- sisted of users transmitting files to other users. 1966 The first paper on network experiments is published by Larry Roberts and Thomas Marrill (“Toward a Cooperative Network of Time-Shared Computers”). Robert Taylor of NASA succeeds Sutherland as head of ARPA. He hires Larry Roberts to head IPTO. 1967 Roberts and Taylor present the idea for a decentralized computer data net- work at a meeting of ARPA’s principle investigators in Ann Arbor, Michigan. During an ARPANET design session, Wes Clark suggests the use of mini- computers for network packet switching. 1968 Larry Roberts circulates a request for proposal (RFP) among manufacturers for network hardware for ARPANET. The contract is won by Bolt, Beranek, and Neuman (BBN). Tymshare time-sharing service begins building a circuit- switched network to serve its business clients. President Lyndon Johnson man- dates that all computers purchased by the US government support ASCII. 182 Appendix A Online Timeline 1969 BBN delivers the first Internet message processors (IMPs) to ARPA experi- menters at UCLA and Stanford. On October 29, the first-ever computer message is transmitted between the two. By year’s end, two more nodes (University of California, Santa Barbara and the University of Utah) are added to the network, now called ARPANET. Compu-Serv is founded in Columbus, Ohio, as a time-sharing service. 1970 The National Library of Medicine experiments with public access to its MEDLARS database via teletypewriters. ARPANET spans the continent with a connection to BBN in Cambridge, Massachusetts. This enables BBN engi- neers to monitor and troubleshoot ARPANET from their headquarters. Nodes are being added to the network at the rate of one per month. 1971 Bunker Ramo puts the Dow Jones-Bunker Ramo News Retrieval Service (later Dow Jones News/Retrieval Service, or DJNS) online. Lockheed’s Dialog goes online. Underwritten by the NSF, the Mitre Corporation begins a 12-month teletext experiment that involves cable TV subscribers in Reston, Virginia. The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) applies for a patent on a teletext system it calls “Teledata.” 1972 Tymshare announces it will make its data network publicly available. Ray Tomlinson of BBN creates the first network program for sending email. He specifies @ as the net address indicator. ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency) is renamed DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency). The first public demonstration of the Internet takes place in Washington, DC. (At this point, ARPANET is using NCP, Network Control Protocol, to enable communications between hosts on the network. It will be replaced by TCP/IP.) Roberts writes the first email management program (RD), enabling users to send direct replies to email, and file and delete